Fujitsu's Primergy BX630 blade will soon pack a 16-way punch. The Opteron-powered dual-core blade will scale up to 8 sockets.

Fujitsu lays claim to being the first of the major OEMs to deliver a standard-architecture 8-socket, dual-core blade server system. This option is in line with Fujitsu's intent to offer increased density and scalability with lower power and space requirements. The blade extension enables administrators to scale the infrastructure up and out in a single chassis.

The BX630 blade servers can be installed in the current BX600 chassis alongside the Xeon-based BX620 S2 or BX660 blades. It can be clustered with them, if desired. Enterprises also have the option of starting with the 2-socket blade and growing it to an 8-way to complement their changing business needs.

Fujitsu is able to offer this option because of the structure AMD's Opteron processors. The chip's architecture contains AMD's HyperTransport interconnect, which makes it possible to link two BX630 2-socket blades into a single 4-socket blade, and then link two of these 4-socket blade into a single BX630 8-socket blade. With the 8-socket processors, the system has the power of a 16-core server.

The offering is aimed at "people who need one or two 8-ways, along with 2-way and 4-way systems," Richard McCormack, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Fujitsu Computer Systems, told ServerWatch.

One key advantage of the BX630 over a comparable rack-based offering is that it is far quicker to deploy, according to McCormack.

McCormack notes that the 2-socket rack is currently the most popular offering.

The BX630 8-socket server will begin shipping in the second quarter of 2006. Pricing for the blade starts below $2,250 in a 2-socket configuration. The BX630 with 8 socket is priced below $36,000.